Zentrepreneur Symposium Series Launches in Partnership with UC Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz Works

Registration Opens for Groundbreaking New Creative Thinking Training Program and Symposium Series

October 1, 2018 – Santa Cruz, CA – The Zentrepreneur Symposium Series is a weekly four-part program created by serial entrepreneur and Silicon Valley executive, Toby Corey (Tesla, SolarCity, USWeb, Novell) and will launch in partnership with the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz Works.

The symposium is based on Zentrepreneur.Life http://www.zentrepreneur.life, a platform for college students created with new world ethics and values inspiring creative thinking. Our mission is to create a new world by inspiring, educating and guiding a new generation of entrepreneurs, social & environmental warriors and creative spirits to challenge the status quo by thinking creatively.

The Zentrepreneur.Life community provides a code or ethics, resources and mentorship focused on nurturing the creativity and unique qualities of its members, enabling them to translate imagination into new experiences. The series will be led by Toby Corey and feature guest speakers from the world of business, industry and education including: best selling author of Blue Mind, Wallace J Nichols, PhD; Theresa Lina Stevens, a lightning-bolt of marketing and creative brilliance, she’s the founder and president of Lina Group, Inc., a strategic marketing consulting firm that specializes in market dominance strategy; Susan Kennedy, former Diane Feinstein Communication Director, Governor Gray Davis Deputy Chief of Staff, Commissioner for the California Public Utilities Commission, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger Chief of Staff, and Founder/CEO Advanced Microgrid Solutions; Lyndon Rive, SolarCity Founder/CEO, leader in sustainable energy movement.

The series begins Thursday, October 11th through November 1st and meets once weekly for four weeks from 5:20 - 7:00 p.m. at the Silmularium on the UC Santa Cruz campus: Engineering 2, 1156 High St, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. The program can accommodate up to 100 participants and registration opens today http://bit.ly/zlife-UCSC. The series is free to UCSC/Cabrillo College students and SCW members and is $10 per session for community members.

“I’m proud to introduce a new, non-profit venture this fall: Zentrepreneur.Life.This program is for college students and all aspiring-entrepreneurs, created with evolutionary ethics and values, resources and mentorship that inspire creative thinking. Zentrepeneur.Life has grown out of my life and career experiences, surf and conscious awareness practice, and my years teaching entrepreneurship at Stanford University,” said Toby Corey, founder of Zentrepreneur.Life. “Our mission is to inspire, educate and guide a new generation of entrepreneurs, social & environmental warriors and creative spirits to challenge the toxic status quo by thinking more collectively and creatively.”

“We’re honored to be founding partners of Zentrepreneurship.Life, with UC Santa Cruz. Toby Corey is an inspiring and dynamic leader who exemplifies and amplifies the qualities that are driving the Santa Cruz tech movement - a potent combination of ethical, spiritual, and scientific thinking that is leading a new wave of conscious innovation across industries. Our startups benefit from Zentrepreneurship’s frameworks for making these guiding principles the foundation for any new venture,” said Keri Waters, President Santa Cruz Works.

“Baskin Engineering is extremely excited to join in partnership with Zentrepreneur.Life and Santa Cruz Works,” said Alexander L. Wolf, Dean of the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. “Today’s Gen-Z students seem to be hard-wired to create and innovate in ways that have positive social impact, making this a very special time to educate our future engineers. The 5:20 Series will help light their path toward satisfying and meaningful careers and lives.”

In this symposium series you will learn:

To integrate mindfulness, nature appreciation, and focus into a more creative way of approaching your life with less stress;

To develop new thought through patterns that lead to new behaviors, experiences and feelings to enhance your life;

To draw on diverse backgrounds and perspectives to magnify and elevate your wisdom and creativity;

And techniques to tap into a field of infinite creativity to make the world a better place.

The Zentrepreneur.Life community follows a set of principles that guide your way with resources and mentorship focused on nurturing the creativity and unique qualities of its members, enabling them to translate imagination into new experiences. We do this by:

Thinking, leading and acting in the Zentrepreneur Way, 22 ethical principles centered on Gratitude, Equanimity, Natural Life-flow, Service Mindset and Deep Nature Connection, sources of a creative mindset.

Creating Symposium Series hosted at leading colleges and universities enabling students to translate imagination into new experiences.

Is your spirit restless? Do you believe that you are unique, yet part of something so much larger than you? Are you passionate about creating a better world for all? What indelible mark will you leave behind?

Zentrepreneur.Life is a platform for college students created with new world ethics and values inspiring creative thinking. Our mission is to create a new world by inspiring, educating and guiding a new generation of entrepreneurs, social & environmental warriors and creative spirits to challenge the status quo by thinking creatively.

The Zentrepreneur.Life community provides a code or ethics, resources and mentorship focused on nurturing the creativity and unique qualities of its members, enabling them to translate imagination into new experiences.

Zentrepreneur.Life connects college students (Generation Z) and Millennial founders, their leadership team, those interested in starting/joining an early stage venture and those wanting to learn more about taking control of their careers and being happier in life through creative thinking and modern mentorship.

Entrepreneurship is a creative mindset fostered within the concept of an Open Social Network1 where members are connected with non-traditional points of view and perspectives, in an environment of constructive honesty. Being connected to mentors and peers with differing experiences and aspirations has the benefit of delivering more insightful knowledge and actionable insights.

Open Social Networks are fundamentally different and more powerful than self- reinforcing bubbles of like-minded connections we build on traditional platforms. We are highly social creatures and the secret ingredient to both career success and happiness lies in our ability to create and cultivate the right kind of relationships at the right time that expand thinking and human consciousness. How do you get access to different insights, skills and values with those that complement our own skillset?

We do this by:

1. Committing to thinking, leading and acting by the ethics and values of the “Zentrepreneurs Way,” a method of connected thinking centered on five main principles: Gratitude, Equanimity, Natural Life-flow, Service Mindset and Deep Nature Connection.

2. Committing to help one another for the greater good by teaching, creating, curating and sharing stories, best practices, information, content, methodologies and tools.

3. Connecting Zentrepreneurs with mentors and coaches matched via an intelligent system that recruits, vets and trains seasoned and up-and-coming mentors, fitting their personality traits, domain expertise and other attributes, with the right Zentrepreneur based on their unique needs

The Zentrepreneur.life platform provides the following member benefits:

The Zentrepreneur Way – An open-source blueprint designed to inspire and teach our community how to think creatively about the world, their place in it, and their impact. https://goo.gl/jaxnZu

Zentrepreneur original content – A digital and live college campus open symposium series, set in interview storytelling style format, with the world's leading entrepreneurs, and provocative thinking guests. Developed and hosted by Stanford Lecturer, successful entrepreneur and former Tesla executive, Toby Corey.

The Zentreprenur’s Guide – best-in-class content, information, methodologies and tools. Curated by the world’s best Entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists and leading thinkers.

Mentor Zen – a mobile-first social platform that recruits and vets talented mentors and uniquely matches them with the right Zentrepreneurs. Built on LinkedIn profile information, social media personality data and other personal attributes, our proprietary system connects the right mentor with the right Zentrepreneur; while using AI to learn precisely how to optimize matching for better and better results. Initially focused on founders and their leadership teams, our larger vision is to create a new way to create and build relationships based on a mentor-orientation and an “open network” concept.

The world’s leading network scientists concluded that simply being in an open network, instead of a closed one, is the best predictor of career success. Open networks provide unique insights through unique knowledge acquisition that can’t be gained through a traditional network. The benefits provide a more accurate view of the world and more breakthrough ideas. A big part of creativity is just connecting things. Open networks allow one to see things from unique perspectives and diverse experiences and then being able to connect more dots to synthesize new things. Conversely, a closed network limits the number of dots to connect, and one ends up with very linear thinking without broad perspective. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, combined with access to more unique perspectives, the more creativity will flow.

Zen emphasizes rigorous self-control, meditation-practice, insight into Buddha-nature, and the personal expression of this insight in daily life, especially for the benefit of others.Entrepreneurship is derived from a French word ‘Entreprendre’ which means ‘to undertake’, ‘to pursue opportunities’, or ‘to fulfill needs and wants through innovation and starring businesses’. The word first appeared in French dictionary in 1723. Today’s modern definition broadens the term to encompass vital creative thinking and activity to bring about changes in economy and society. Zentrepreneurship is that immense strength, spirit of humanity and creative force- of-nature in us all that is destined to change the world for the benefit of all.

Founder, Toby Corey:

I used to think the Universe was like a sheet of paper. I often wondered what would happen if I could peel it back to see what’s underneath. I also used to think that I was figuring life out over time, silly me. I realized the more I expanded my consciousness, the more infinite my reality became. I am learning to fall into this expansion, to allow life to flow naturally, to identify that the real prize is the journey. Today I look at our existence as a limitless field of unruly flowers - restless in spirit, beautifully imperfect. So I ask you, as I’ve often asked myself, “What indelible mark are you creating?”

As a lifelong entrepreneur and college lecturer, I noticed a lack of social consciousness, a lack of self-awareness and a purely material focus in the community. These qualities, ethics and values differed greatly with my own ethos and those of the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve come across in my long career. They embodied an acute clarity and connection of the greater world, deep empathy, and a natural inclination to help others succeed.

Through this observation, Zentrepreneurship was born in Santa Cruz, CA; a way to create your own footsteps on the path of life.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire universe, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” ― Albert Einstein

Career Highlights: Successfully managed three $1B+ businesses (one as co- founder/President), two successful IPO’s, raised over $300M in private and public financing, former President of leader in clean energy services with successful IPO and successful Tesla merger, co-founder and former President/COO of worldwide leader in web development services with $3B+ market cap and successful IPO, managed a 7,000+ employee organization, operating globally, granted two “messaging” patents, executed 40+ M&A transactions while career path disrupted information technology, digital economy, renewable energy and mobile sectors.

Zentrepreneur.life, born 2018, Santa Cruz, California. A spark in a New World.